Demon Hunts

by C. E. Murphy

  Sara had her damned gun out again. I wasn’t sure I could help Gary, but I could at least keep him from getting shot. I flung up my shield again, this time willing it to be visible. I knew it could be—a few hundred partygoers had gotten an eyeful of it at Halloween—but visible wasn’t its natural state. It worked, though. Sara cupped the gun’s butt and pointed the muzzle toward the sky as silver-blue burst into being all around her. Around her and everybody else, in a sort of doughnut with Gary and the wendigo in its hollow center. Sara, for the hundredth time, yelled, “What the hell?”

  I got to my feet. “Don’t shoot. I don’t know if the shield will hold bullets or ricochet them. And don’t touch it. You might get fried.” I was sure she wouldn’t, but I hoped it would keep her out of the way while I figured how to answer her.

  For something I’d fallen through, the wendigo looked pretty damned substantial. It seized Gary in its mouth and shook him wildly, and when he refused to bend or break, flung him to the ground again in a huge poof of snow. I cried out, but he just rolled to his feet, a slow pedantic action that went well with the way his shoulders gathered in a methodical hunch. He muttered, “Let’s dance,” and the wendigo paused a moment, like it was smart enough to be surprised at the phrase.

  Gary charged it, a slow run that slammed a broad shoulder into its gut. They both went flying off the side of the road and bounced through the snow. Like everybody else, I rushed over to watch. They bashed into two pine trees, breaking first their fall, and then the trees, which creaked and shuddered and collapsed in a rain of snow and needles.

  The wendigo was on its feet first, but Gary swung a fist up, catching the thing in its enormous jaw. The crack reverberated up the hillside and everybody around me hissed in a painful, impressed breath. Me, I wasn’t breathing at all, and didn’t know if I ever would again. Gary was a tough old coot, and still had the linebacker build of his youth, but it seemed utterly impossible that he could hold his own against a semi-embodied, soul-sucking, flesh-eating monster.

  I flung power toward them, not even so much as a net. More like a lasso, just to find out if my magic had more effect than my physical attack had. It whistled through the wendigo harmlessly, which didn’t surprise me, and whooshed through Gary as effortlessly, which did. I lurched toward the incline, heart hammering so hard I could barely see. If Gary was as unaffected by my magic as the wendigo was, I was horribly afraid he wasn’t exactly alive anymore.

  Coyote’s hand on my shoulder stopped me. I jerked away, but he caught me again, pulling me around so I could see astonishment curving his lips into a smile. “Your friend’s spirit is strong.”

  That sounded so much like hokey-jokey Indian crap that I nearly decked him. Then a tiny bit of cleverness caught up and I whipped around again, trying to See more clearly. I’d been using the Sight all along, but I’d been paying attention to the wendigo, not Gary.

  Who was carrying a great big beautiful tortoise shell on his back. More than on his back: it was somehow larger than he was, solid plates protecting him all around. A tortoise’s huge snapping jaws translated into enormous physical strength, far more than an ordinary man could command. He got to his feet ponderously, every action deliberate, and when the wendigo leaped at him again he ducked, caught it on his back, and did the nicest back-slam I’d ever seen outside of pro wrestling.

  The wendigo screamed. Gary rolled over, unscathed by its tiny clawing arms, and lifted a heavy fist to drive it down, not fast, but implacably, into the beast’s chest.

  It wasn’t bone that splintered, but souls. The fragments and tattered remains of the wendigo’s meals contracted and shriveled, becoming part of its body as it tried frantically to repair itself. Gary hit it again, then again, and its screams turned to panicked squeals as it twisted, trying to escape. Gary held it where I couldn’t, caught between corporeality and insubstantiality. Even now I couldn’t get my magic to take hold, though a glimmer of understanding finally washed over me.

  I was used to fighting in one realm at a time. There were frequently metaphysical manifestations that cropped up during physical battles, but mostly, I fought in the Middle World. I wasn’t used to switching wholesale from one level of reality to another in the middle of a fight. The wendigo, though, was completely unconstrained in its ability to move from the physical world to the spirit. I couldn’t catch the damned thing because I couldn’t keep up. Watching Gary and his tortoise spirit, I thought maybe, maybe, if I gave myself over to Raven entirely, I might be able to slide between realities as freely as Gary and the wendigo were now doing.

  I wasn’t sure I trusted Raven that much. I wasn’t sure I trusted anything that much. I admired the hell out of Gary, that he could let himself be so subsumed by the tortoise spirit. I’d asked the tortoise to protect him, but I didn’t think either of us had anticipated just how far the totem animal would go to do that.

  I also wondered, briefly, if giving myself to Raven that completely would be as effective as Gary’s tortoise was against the wendigo. I didn’t exactly think of tortoises as deadly predators, but their sheer size and strength made them worth reckoning with. Ravens were more likely to peck somebody to distraction than destroy them with slow relentless determination.

  Determination that the wendigo couldn’t stand against. It broke free, shrieking with pain and terror, and Gary’s lunge at it was just that much too slow. Hope springing eternal, I flung a net around both of them, encompassing whole yards of sky and earth within it, but the wendigo slipped to spirit form and disappeared through my lashings without a trace. “God damn it! Where’d it—is it coming back? Coyote? Is it going to—?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s too badly hurt.”

  I whispered a prayer to a deity I didn’t entirely believe in, and slid down the mountainside until I reached Gary. He was on his knees, gray eyes wide and uncertain. His tortoise spirit was retreating, no longer needing to encompass him with its protective strength. I crashed into him, hugging him hard, and poured a pulse of my own healing magic through him. Even if the tortoise had taken the brunt of that fight, getting chewed on by a wendigo couldn’t be good for anybody. “Gary, are you okay?”

  “Right as rain, doll.”

  His eyes rolled up and he fell over in a faint.

  ———

  He woke up again almost instantly, a face full of snow apparently just about as effective as smelling salts. I got myself under his arm and we clambered back up the hill, huffing and puffing like two old geezers. Well, like one old geezer and one young one. Close enough.

  Somehow I was surprised to find a couple dozen federal agents and a news team waiting for us at the top. I said, “Don’t ask,” and of course everybody did anyway. Under their babbling, I said, “Mind playing up being fragile? At least some of them will volunteer to help get you back down the hill, and that leaves me fewer to deal with.”

  Gary whispered, “I donno,” back. “Am I fragile?”

  I snorted, trying not to let it turn into an out-loud laugh. “About as fragile as a bulldozer, I think.”

  “In that case I don’t mind at all.” He lifted his voice a little and put a convincing quaver in it, sounding more like a querulous old man than I’d ever heard him. “Somebody gimme a hand? I ain’t feelin’ so good. I think I hit my head….”

  More Feds than I expected stepped forward. A few just looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here, but one, a woman about my age, looked a little starstruck. If Gary hooked up with a girl forty years his junior I was never going to hear the end of it. Either I’d lost my old silver stallion to a younger, prettier model, or I’d set him on the road to being a dirty, dirty old man. He came out ahead and I looked like a dork either way.

  Oh well. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a lot of practice at that. About eight of them, including the young woman, opted to help carry him down the mountain. I didn’t think any of them saw the roguish wink he gave me as they carted him off.

  Sadly, eight still left me with about fi
fteen agents and two news reporters to deal with. Corvallis looked like her brain was collapsing in on itself as she tried to process what she’d seen, or maybe more accurately, hadn’t quite seen.

  Sara said, “Get back to work,” to her team, then gave me a sharp look. “Is it safe?”

  I wondered what it had cost her to ask, and wished I had a better answer than, “I think so.”

  She nodded, and her people reluctantly dispersed. I hated to think how much mess had been made of their crime scene, though on the positive side they weren’t going to find anything useful anyway. When we were alone, she said, “What was it?”

  “A wendigo.” I mostly wanted to see if it meant anything to her. It wouldn’t have to me not that long ago—like, yesterday—but the skin around her eyes tightened a little, as if she at least recognized the word.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still into that mystical crap, Joanne.”

  I started to say, “It’s a soul-eating demon,” only it came out “Woo-woob-wha? Mystical crap? Me? Into it?”

  “You were totally into it. Freaky into it. You were always talking about these big meaningful dreams you had.” She made quote marks around half the words in that sentence, while I reeled and tried to match my teenage memories with Sara’s violently clashing ones. “Your ‘spirit guide,’” she said. “Your ‘shamanic training.’ You were so full of shit.”

  I put away trying to reconcile disparate memories and looked down at her for a while. I was tall enough that just looking at people could get them to back off sometimes, but she had federal agent training and, more important, remembered me as an awkward teenager. One she apparently hadn’t liked as much as I thought she had. That’s what I said, actually. “Wow. You really didn’t like me very much, did you? I had…no idea.” It stung, the same way learning she and Lucas had kept in touch. I was willing to admit I’d screwed it up. Unintentionally, maybe, but I’d screwed it up. Still, the idea that we’d never really been friends cut a lot deeper than it should’ve, all these years later.

  She glanced away, a trace of guilt slithering across her pretty features. It made me feel a little better, not because I wanted her to feel badly, but because maybe it meant we had been friends and she’d just heaped a lot of after-the-fact resentment onto the relationship. I was coming to realize I knew more than a little about that kind of behavior.

  “It doesn’t matter. I guess I am still into it.” I had no recollection at all of being into mystical stuff in high school, and wondered if those memories had faded the same way my Coyote dreams had faded. Wondered, in fact, whether they’d had help in fading, which made me want to kick Coyote’s shin just in case. “It’s kind of what I’m doing now. It doesn’t really matter if you believe in it or not, but you’re not going to f…” I trailed off because Laurie Corvallis had worked her way into my line of vision, and was staring at us very nearly hard enough to set my hair on fire. I’d forgotten she was there. “Shit.”

  Sara glanced at her like she was of slightly less significance than a bug. “Don’t worry. I can seize her tapes under the Patriot Act if I need to.”

  For the first and possibly the last time in history, Corvallis and I started spluttering in outrage for the same reason. Sara said, “Oh, great, you’re still a bleeding-heart liberal, too,” and grabbed my arm to haul me several steps away. Corvallis tried to follow, but two of Sara’s agents materialized—a word I should’ve use more cautiously, given the wendigo’s vanish-and-reappear act—between us. Corvallis bounced on her toes, trying to see what was going on. A mean little part of me snickered. Sadly, that part was attached to my voice box, so it happened out loud, but Sara only smirked and didn’t chide me. “You were saying?”

  “That you’re not going to find a conventional killer. I know there’s no point in asking you to step back, but unless the FBI has its own paranormal investigative team, you’re not going to find an answer.” A sudden childish hope sparked in me. “Do you? Is there really like an X-Files department? I would’ve made a great—”

  “Mulder,” Sara finished, which was not at all what I’d been going to say. “If we’ve got X-Files, I don’t know about them.” And don’t want to, her tone said. “Are you for real? You think there’s some kind of mythological monster out here in the woods killing people?”

  “Can you give me a logical explanation, a clear definition, of what you saw in the last half hour?” I raised a hand, blocking any answer she might give to what was effectively a rhetorical question. “Seriously, Sara, what did you see? Because I can hardly see this thing myself, and it’s probably easier for me than most people.” That sounded better than “for you.”

  Her upper lip curled and flattened again, almost invisible signal of frustration. “A wolf,” she finally said, in much the same way Gary’d named it a bear. “I don’t know, Joanne. I could barely focus on it. It had teeth, that’s all I know, and all my victims have been eaten. Let’s say I believe you.”

  Way, way, way under my breath, I mumbled, “I believe you,” obediently. People hardly ever thought that was as funny as I did, though, so I hoped she hadn’t heard, but mostly I wished life came with emoticons, so I could stamp a disembodied smiley face in the air next to me as an indication that other people should think I was funny, too.

  “If I believe you, and this isn’t something bullets can handle, what am I supposed to do? Go back to my bosses and say sorry, no idea what happened, but I promise it’s over? What are you going to do? And how are you going to prove you’re right if you kill this thing?”

  “By Seattle not being the epicenter of cannibal killings anymore? Honestly, I don’t know yet how to stop this thing.” That was clearly the wrong thing to say. Sara’s jaw tensed and she turned her shoulders in a way that indicated closing-off body language. I hurried along, words tumbling over each other. “It’s coming at me from a different place than anything else I’ve gone up against, Sara. I’ll take it down. I always have before. But it’s a lot easier if I don’t have civilians around to worry about.”

  I’d forgotten her quirky lifted eyebrow. She didn’t raise it up high like most people did. She only twitched it just enough to indicate she was amused, and that hadn’t changed in thirteen years. Hopeful, I smiled back just a little. “I use the word ‘civilians’ advisedly.”

  “You better. Look, Joanne. I can’t pull out. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I do. Just…if you believe me at all, just drop when I say get down, okay?”

  She sighed, the sound starting somewhere around her ankle bones. “Okay.”

  “Good,” I said. “Great. Get down!“

  Sara hit the deck, and the wendigo came tearing over us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It smelled of desperation, a scent I’d only associated with humans before, and even that as a parable rather than an actual definable stink. But its stench was sour, and there was no method to its behavior, just a frenzied launch at those closest to it. Sara was facedown in six inches of snow, and the thing rebounded off me, sending me into a backward stagger.

  I could feel the agents’ life-pulses so clearly I didn’t need to see them, and snapping fresh shields up was by now instinctive. The wendigo leaped from body to body, bouncing off, and finally, with a howl, turned back to me. Shields or not, it landed on me like a ton of bricks. I sank down but shot my hands upward, grabbing at its thick neck.

  Thick, but smaller than it had been. Gary’d done a lot of damage in his brief battle, and I knew it was starving for lack of souls, for lack of flesh.

  Given that it had backed off from me twice now, it had to be desperate to attack me when it had been weakened. It made sense: I could probably power it back up to its previous size, all in one tidy snack, but I didn’t think it was happy about its range of choices. It swung its head, hot saliva spattering my face as it pressed down, trying to make my arms buckle. I wasn’t about to falter, but neither did I know exactly what to do now that I had it by the throat. Using my magic as a weapon was a
cosmic no-no, and I didn’t dare let go so I could draw my sword. I had unpleasant visions of lying here in the snow for the rest of eternity, trying to throttle something that wasn’t exactly alive.

  Coyote appeared, a silhouette against the blue sky, and clobbered the wendigo with a tree branch. It howled, whacked him away, and fled. I heard Coyote hit the snow, and then silence broken only by the harsh breathing of those around us. Even that faded after a minute, and there was nothing but wind and the occasional plop of snow falling from trees to the ground. I ventured, “Sara?” and got a muffled grunt in reply.

  “I think it’s gone. I think maybe you and your people should go back down to the lodge and keep anybody from going hiking or skiing or whatever. What do you think?”

  “I think that sounds like a good use of federal resources.” She sounded almost like the girl I’d been friends with a lifetime ago. Snow squeaked as she got up, and I lay there listening to the brief, unconvinced and unconvincing arguments presented by her forensics team. A couple of them decided to stay behind, with a handful of others offering to stand guard while they worked. I didn’t think any of them imagined they were going to find anything, but I admired their work ethic. The rest took Corvallis and her cameraman, the former complaining bitterly, and headed back to the hotel to keep tourists from getting themselves eaten.

  I was pretty sure I should join them, but staring at the sky as I lay deep in what would be a snow angel if I could muster the energy to wave my arms and legs had its appeal, too. “So,” I said eventually. “Nice job there at the end, scaring it off.”

  Coyote’s voice drifted up out of the snow. “I think it was trying to escape and went after you because it was desperate. That wasn’t a real attack.”

  “Yeah, I know. Still, you got it off me.” I lay there awhile longer, replaying the last several minutes in my mind, and coming up repeatedly against Coyote’s expression of distaste and terror as he struggled with the wendigo. In time, I repeated, “So. This fighting thing. You’re not actually very good at it.”